Days before the Democratic primary
for governor, it seems like two
camps have finally emerged.
Why is the establishment more
united now?
And is it too little, too late?
This is Inside Wisconsin Politics.
I'm Sean Johnson here with my
colleagues, Anya Van Wagtendonck,
Zach Schultz, and Rich Kramer in
Eau Claire. Hey everyone.
Hello.
So it seems like just a
few weeks ago on this show,
we were all kind of wondering where
all these candidates in this big
primary fit, what
were their political lanes?
It seems like the mainstream front
runner at that point was less
clear.
Zach, why is it sort of coming
into focus now and is
there enough time?
I think you have to look at this
primary in the context of the
national political mood for primary
voters, which are Democrats that are
mainly angry at Donald Trump and his
administration.
If you look at it in that frame,
the establishment's the bad guy.
The establishment is national
Democrats who haven't done enough to
stand up to Trump.
So tapping into those voters meant
you couldn't be the establishment
because then you were on the side of
inertia.
So Francesca Hong clearly moved to
the left. She was going to fight,
fight, fight.
And a lot of the other Democrats in
this race were trying to outflank
her, and they just could not.
Even as late as a few weeks ago,
David Crowley was not happy to be
called the establishment.
Mandela Barnes denied that there was
any lane that he could be put into
before he dropped out of the race.
No one wanted to be pinned as
establishment because that
kind of denied them access to the
voters that were upset and wanted
change.
That looked like more of the same.
And so it is a little too
late in the sense that if there's a
lot votes that have already been
cast, but it is now.
Clearly going that there has to be a
centralized candidate of
establishment power if they want
to challenge the lane that Francesca
Hong has already solidified for
herself.
And I know you've covered David
Crowley. I mean, it seems like he
still doesn't want that
establishment label for
a variety of reasons.
Why is that?
Yeah, I mean, part of it is what
Zach just described, is that there's
really a lot of anger towards
the establishment for, I think,
what Democrats feel or some
Democrats feel has been inertia
and sort of not enough of a
fight and not wanting the status
quo. But also David Crowley has a
particularly kind of interesting
personal backstory.
He comes from a really
sort of impoverished challenge
background in Milwaukee.
And so up until, you
know, he dropped out the first time
in this race.
He was kind of described as
potentially not electable because
statewide there's
sometimes negative feelings about
Milwaukee, there is always
the racial element of the fact that
there's never been a black man
elected to statewide office in
Wisconsin, so there were all these
questions about him.
Then he comes back with the
endorsement of Tony Evers and all of
a sudden he's described as the
establishment.
One thing I've heard from a lot of
his supporters is like...
Well, which one is it?
Is it that he's too Milwaukee or is
he too establishment?
He can't be both.
Why is he being held to the
standard? And I think he's also
trying to say, I've
really kind of had to fight
to get everything that I've ever
had. I was not handed things.
I am not on this kind of gilded
establishment path.
That said, I do have some of this
backing and the resources that will
allow me to win.
So again, it's a little bit
threading the needle of I'm a viable
candidate, but I will also stand
up to the things that you're angry
about.
You know, I always worry when we
start putting candidates into camps
like this, whether this is just sort
of a media narrative that we've
created or if there's something real
to it, but I feel like the
fundraising numbers that came out
this week, Rich, do put some
substance behind the idea
that there are these camps emerging
between Francesca Hong and
David Crowley.
What did they show?
Well, they showed a couple of things
that were pretty notable.
First of all, Crowley raised
more than twice as much money during
the month of July, most of the
month, most of month of the
July. He raised $776,000
there about, and Hong brought in
around $339,000.
So that is a big sign that,
at least in terms of money,
Crowley's campaign is getting some
backing. And the other sign that
caught my attention was Governor
Tony Evers, you know, who endorsed
Crowley's campaign, which is
definitely being framed as an
alternative to Francesca Hong.
He also gave $20,000
from Evers'
campaign account to Crowley campaign
account.
That's not a lot of money, but I was
talking with Anthony Trigosky, the
political science professor over at
UW-La Crosse, and he said,
you know, it's not lot of my $20.000
doesn't buy you a whole lot, but
it could be a signal to
Evers donors, Eber supporters that.
I'm not just saying I support this,
I'm putting my money behind it.
So, Tchaikovsky was saying it's
potentially possible that
it'll open up some more of that
money from the more
moderate, quote unquote,
establishment wing of the party.
Yeah, I mean, I think anecdotally, I
do see the message being received
as some of these other candidates'
campaign signs in my neighborhood
anyway, in Madison, that were
supporting people like Sarah
Rodriguez, for example, have changed
to David Crowley.
I guess my question though, Zach,
is can Governor Tony Evers,
popular governor, popular within the
party, but a lame duck governor
this late in
a primary campaign?
Kind of steer the ship like
this. Can he tell everybody at
once at the last minute?
Hey vote for this guy
He can try, but the evidence
throughout history shows that
endorsements don't do a lot,
especially late.
Early endorsements show that
a candidate has viability.
Early endorsement from unions or
from old political people can really
surge momentum early in the game
when it's necessary for someone
like David Crowley to have boosted
his name in a crowded field.
Late in the games it has less impact
because people have made up their
own minds and they're less likely to
be swayed by one political figure.
They can say, oh, that's nice, you
like him.
But I've already had time to make up
my mind. And we've seen it with the
Michigan governor and her
endorsement and the Michigan Senate
race and her candidate losing.
We've seen in other places where
endorsements don't have the same
power that maybe they did 20,
30, 40, 50 years ago when
bestowing the next person as an
establishment figure meant a lot
more than in today's politics.
The governor wants to frame it as
sort of a binary choice, a
two-candidate race.
It's not that.
There are still other candidates in
the race. Senator Calderoy's,
former Department of Administration
Secretary Joel Brennan.
Anya, how do they fit into
this and what role
could they play in this primary?
Yeah, I mean, we do end up kind of
talking and we have for the last
couple of weeks about it as almost a
Crowley Hong race.
And so they do end of kind of
getting some some perhaps shafting
in the conversation from the media
because I think there's a sense that
this is Hong's race to lose is the
phrase that you've used before.
And so it's kind of Hong against
everyone else.
And so Crowley has been sort of the
anointed one.
But then Roy's and Brennan are just
kind of in the mix there.
And so I think it really is again
when we talk about establishment
versus progressive.
The other three candidates just kind
of get lumped together.
They're obviously trying to
distinguish themselves.
Again, when we talk about
endorsements, Calderoy's got this
really important teacher's union
endorsement that didn't seem to
really shift anything early on,
whereas 10, 15 years
ago, that would have been a much
more meaningful thing.
So again, I think it just kind
speaks to you.
Francesca Hong is running a really
unique, strange race.
She has not raised as much money,
but it doesn't seem matter.
She's making sort of headlines.
On her own, sort of
organically, rather than through
these paid ways.
And then all these other candidates
are just kind of trying to
catch up.
And she's not putting herself on TV,
but other people are, you've had
these Republican groups consistently
putting her in TV ads, calling her
liberal ahead of this primary.
She has spent zero dollars
on television, which is just unheard
of in any type of serious race.
And she's not running just a serious
race, she's running the leading
race.
She's doing some digital media
and things like this.
But a lot of her campaign is very
grassroots, very kind of door to
door. And so you're right, if you
see her face on your TV or on your
YouTube, it is because these
Republican groups are paying for
ads, trying to get her over the
finish line, cause they think she's
beatable. But meanwhile, she kind
of says, you know, thanks for
calling attention to my policies.
So our election is not happening in
a vacuum.
There is kind of this wave of
democratic socialist or democratic
socialist backed candidates around
the country who have done
exceedingly well in this year's
politics compared to in previous
years.
This week in Michigan, Abdul
El-Sayed, a progressive
candidate backed by democratic
socialist allies nearly won a
primary there for a US Senate seat
over an establishment backed
Congresswoman.
Anya, I guess everyone is taking the
exact same message from this one,
right? Everyone's on the same page
about what it means for here.
Yeah, you know, in politics,
everyone just reads everything in
the exact same way.
So of course, you know, again, this
this overarching question this year
is like, what direction are
Democrats going in?
Are they going in this more
progressive lane or not?
And so I think for people who want
to see that DSA backing and
these kind of more progressive
leanings are are
are viable in a way that they
haven't been before.
Elsayed's victory is a signal of
that. But David Crowley is saying
actually the fact that it was so
close gives me hope for my campaign
because he had all of
this outside funding, he had all of
these outside attention, and he
still didn't run away with it.
And so even though, again, we see
all these polling numbers and things
like this that indicate that Hong is
currently running away with the
primary, he's saying we actually
might be really surprised on primary
night.
Yeah, I mean, Rich, we haven't
reported on this.
And we typically don't talk about
these internal polls.
But this one was interesting from
the Crowley campaign,
where they said, hear
me out. This is actually exactly
what we want to hear for Wisconsin's
primary.
And it sort of stepped through,
I guess, all of the
qualifications that you'd need to
get there.
But big picture, what
is Crowley's camp saying in terms of
why Michigan could mean good things
for us.
Well, for one,
they're saying this memo was saying
that the primary
polling that's been done in
Wisconsin also just
isn't the kind of polling you want
to do to really know where
candidates are at.
They said it was top line and
not looking at people who actually
vote in these sorts of
primaries. The other thing it was
that they were
saying that primary voters, you
know, because of past numbers from
governor races.
Before.
And Senate races, et cetera,
show that in a primary, it's
generally the oldest group,
65 and up, that vote
the most. And they're saying Crowley
is the only candidate talking
directly to those people right
now. So as you mentioned, there were
a lot of qualifiers to get
to the part of the memo from
the Crowley camp that said,
this is essentially a toss-up
between the two of them.
So it will be interesting,
because what I've also noticed is
some pollers.
Um, pollsters have said there's
like this 10 to 13 point
error rate kind of built into
primary polling.
I mean, that's what we saw in
Michigan. El Sayed was, was
leading by 19 points
in one of these polls and the
race came out to be really
close.
He won, but not by
those sorts of numbers.
So what does that say for
the polling that we've been relying
on in Wisconsin to kind
of get a sense of who is in the
front and who's,
you place?
I don't know.
Yeah, Zach,
help me walk through this.
They had like basically four things
you had to suppose.
One was that the primary electorate
is not what the polls show.
It's more like 2018, 2020.
That those are older voters and that
they're gonna go for David Crowley.
And that if you really boil
it down to a two candidate race,
which is not, he does even better.
And when you inform them
of David Crowely,
that his numbers get even better and
put him over the top.
Yeah, there's a lot of assumptions
built into this best case scenario
that even then only puts
it as a toss-up for David Crowley.
But that is the odds that he's got
against him in this scenario given
all that we know about the campaigns
as they stand right now.
And things that are different for
Michigan is Michigan didn't have
multiple candidates that had already
secured absentee votes and then
dropped out of the race.
We don't know how many votes have
already been cast for Sara Rodriguez
for Mandela Barnes.
But I know there are some, because
I've talked to voters who said, I
already voted for them.
Those votes aren't coming back.
They are gone. They will not impact
the winner other than the margin of
difference and the questions of,
hey, would that have made a
difference if they had dropped out
earlier or if those voters had
waited or if they could have spoiled
those ballots and recast them?
Those are all things we won't know.
A lot of this is, in hindsight,
it'll all make a lot more sense.
Right now, it's a lot of projection,
and it's crowly saying, hey don't
count me out.
Don't just front-run her away to
Fran because she's in the lead right
now. I have a legitimate chance, so
if you believe this talk about
establishment and I'm the man,
then vote for me.
All right As
our election becomes the next big
thing in US politics, we're seeing
more national attention and
scrutiny of Francesca Hong that
includes scrutiny of her social
media feed, old tweets,
including one where she talked about
Thanksgiving.
In a since deleted tweet from 2020,
she said, quote, cancel
Thanksgiving, should have done this
in 1621.
If it takes a worldwide pandemic for
us to realize we should stop
celebrating colonialism and the
original super spreader event that
killed indigenous folks and women,
so be it.
An open question to the group
here. Is this tweet relevant
in 2026?
It is, and that people are talking
about it.
It's, it's, we're talking about
here. It's made national news,
national headlines, and you know who
loves to hear about this.
It's the Republicans and Tom
Tiffany.
So I think the context that can
be added to this tweet is
2020 is when Francesca Hong
was first running for the assembly,
running in a very liberal district
in Madison, in an open primary.
So everything she was saying,
whether she believes it now or wants
to talk about it now.
She was saying to a liberal
primary audience in Madison
in 2020,
coming out of the George Floyd
protests, coming out COVID,
all the situations around that.
When you put it in context, her
tweets look like a candidate running
for that office at that time.
The fact that she is a different
candidate running for a different
office today.
We've seen this from lots of
politicians who say, yeah, let's not
talk about that. That was my race
for state Senate.
That was race for assembly.
Not every politician will always
love the stuff that's dug up from
past votes or past campaigns,
but she does have to deal with it.
And so that is what her campaign is
having to handle right now.
Yeah, I guess I'm going to think
about politics as sort of a
the customer is always right
business, the customer being the
voter, where even if you don't
think they're right, you're in the
business as a candidate of winning
votes. And so if enough people
want to pay attention to a tweet
about Thanksgiving, you got a
choice to make.
Rich, do you either kind of hope it
moves on to the next news cycle?
Or you say something about it?
How has Francesca Hong been handling
it?
Well, to me, it seems like
she's tried both.
Initially, she was saying things
like, well, if Republicans want to
focus on that sort of stuff, we're
busy reaching out to voters
and building up our support,
et cetera, et cetera.
So she was kind of waving it off.
But this week, we saw
Hong kind of backtrack
on that
tweet in particular, and a whole
other slew of tweets.
Calling for, from the past,
calling for abolishing police,
abolishing ICE, abolishing the U.S.
Senate, et cetera, et cetera.
So, but with regard to the
Thanksgiving tweet this week,
she said to CNN,
she didn't really say whether or not
she still supports, you know,
canceling Thanksgiving.
She said it's a, that holiday brings
a lot of pain to a lot communities,
but she stopped short of giving
a definitive answer.
And then on Wednesday, she was asked
by Politico about
that tweet, and they
asked what her favorite holiday
is, and she said Thanksgiving.
She said, I don't want to cancel it.
I love it.
So that's obviously
kind of backtracking,
whether that's because she saw
this as a liability
or she's trying to put it to rest,
I don't know, but that.
And also, she said in
the televised debate not long
ago and in these media interviews at
the national level, she said,
well, I as governor can't
defund the police.
And, you know, she she essentially
walked back those as well.
So it's been really interesting to
see not surprising for
a person in that position, but
Always notable.
And you alluded to the office
that she's running for now.
You get a different flavor of tweet
from her, or I guess a post
on X now than you did then.
She's made recent posts about
Thanksgiving, this one from
last year, where she
talked about supporting
the Goodman Center in a
fun drive.
A crucial note there, she is dressed
up in one of those pictures as
a turkey, so seems
like fully embracing the
Thanksgiving holiday right now.
Anya, we cannot talk about social
media without mentioning Dirt
McGurk, social media
account run by David Crowley, Circa
2010 has
his social media past come
back to haunt him.
I mean, it was kind of the first
opposition dump that
came out after he re-entered the
race. And so these are old tweets,
as you mentioned, from about 15
years ago, very reflective
of a 24-year-old
sort of out in the world with this
new technology, where you get to
just announce every single thought
that you're having as you're have
it, if we all recall what Twitter
was like in the year 2010.
So that was a short news cycle.
I don't think it was a fairly
significant one. He certainly said,
you know.
I was a knucklehead, I don't stand
by some of the more problematic
parts of those tweets.
And I do kind of, you know, to play
devil's advocate about how voters
feel about tweets, I have
this question of whether, you
now, voters sort of see what they
want to see. If you want
to oppose David Crowley, you can
point to these tweets as a reason
why you don't trust him or like
him or approve of his character.
And likewise with Fran Hong.
If you do like them, then you can,
it's very easy to kind of dismiss
it. I saw some of Fran Hong
supporters pulling out other times
that she has knocked other holidays.
She's talked about how in
restaurants, she wants to kick out
everyone who shows up in Halloween
costumes, that she hates Valentine's
Day, like working those shifts in
restaurants. So making more of a
joke about it, that this is just
learning more about their
personality and their character.
And I think, you know, we've spent
10, 15 years now having
so much exposure to politicians
through social media in a way that
They don't need to be mediated
through kind of traditional media,
but I think a lot of voters are kind
of used to these more human
sides. I mean, we also saw with
Graham Plattner, what I would
describe as like really kind of
horrible social media posts about
rape victims and other
things that voters really kind of
excused because they wanted to see
the best in this politician that
they really admired and supported
his policies.
And so I think to a certain extent,
we're going to see how important
these kinds of things are.
And I don't really know that
it moves your average
voter other than to sort of
put them in the camp that they might
have been going to either way.
Yeah, in an era when the president
has been known to say some stuff on
social media frequently. To govern
through social media.
These are sort of tamed by
comparison in Wisconsin.
That's all the time we have for
today. Thanks for joining us.
This has been Inside Wisconsin
Politics.
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